By Laura Newman

As I get ready to leave London and head State-side (Duke School of Business here I come!), my to-do list gets longer by the day. That said, as a foodie, I did have one thing sorted a while ago – dinner reservations at my favorite restaurants. As I reviewed the list, it struck me how difficult many were to categorize. If a restaurant blends Indian flavors, French cooking techniques, and tapas-sized portions in a British colonial environment, what style is it? (Londoners, check-out Colony in Marylebone if you’re curious to experience the result.)

At a restaurant, we may refer to this kind of blending as fusion. What if we consider the equivalent in the workplace?  In today’s global, complex businesses our environments are just as diverse. But are we collaborating effectively? Are employees blending approaches and processes to develop new ideas? In other words, are we using collaboration and knowledge exchange as inspiration for innovation; to achieve outcomes?

As Communicators, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to provide the right platforms for collaboration. Do we have opportunities for our employees to blog? Do we have wikis? How about discussion forums?  Could you imagine an internal Facebook?

(CEC members, you will likely have been following our research on internal social media, including how to frame the business case, how to define your strategy, and how to work with other functions such as IT and Legal.)

But as with many other Communications initiatives, when measuring our success in these areas, beyond whether or not the platforms exist, it is tempting to focus our metrics on volume of activity. What percentage of our employee base is actively using these platforms? How many blog posts have been published? How many comments have the forums received?

I appreciate there are a range of benefits you will experience by having active internal social media platforms, including driving awareness and employee engagement. However, I can’t help but wonder whether we should be trying to strive for more than “facilitating knowledge sharing,” which may limit initiatives to sharing for the sake of sharing?

Recent research into organizational networks highlights the potential to drive innovation through collaboration. Rob Cross, an associate professor of management in the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and a key leader of the Network Roundtable, has been studying relationships and informational networks within organizations. According to research that will soon be published in MIS Quarterly, it is not the size of the network that leads to higher performance; it’s the number of ties across individuals that were not previously connected.

“People with ties to the less-connected are more likely to hear about ideas that haven’t gotten exposure elsewhere, and are able to piece together opportunities in ways that less-effectively-networked colleagues cannot,” Rob Cross writes in a March Harvard Business Review blog.

As you review and improve collaboration platforms, I’d be curious to hear how you’ve thought about the goal of “collaboration” (more than facilitated knowledge exchange?) and how you’ve embedded this mindset into your activities, decisions, and metrics.

CEC Related Resources:

• Implement Internal Social Media Topic Center
• Driving Results Through Social Networks: A Conversation with Rob Cross
• Leading in a Connected World

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Disappointed by Internal Social Media? You’re Not Alone
• Why is Cross-Functional Collaboration SO Hard???